Warning : Israel, 'dirty bombs' and the next 9/11 in Europe

Operation Dark Cloud: Israel to begin national drill simulating ‘dirty-bomb’ attack on Themselves

 

In January, a “Dark Cloud” will descend on northern Israel. The name for a civil defense exercise, Dark Cloud will be Israel’s first simulated response to a radioactive dispersal device attack, the official term for what is more commonly known as a “dirty bomb.” 

While defense officials have gone out of their way in recent weeks to downplay the significance of the drill, saying that it is part of the ministry’s regular training regimen, the timing cannot be ignored – it comes as the window of opportunity to stop Iran’s nuclear program is reportedly closing.

The threat of nuclear terrorism has been on Israel’s agenda for a number of years.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak, for example, has said numerous times that while Iran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon it is not because of the possibility that it will fire a long-range ballistic missile immediately into Tel Aviv.

Rather, Barak has said, the possibility that cargo ship carrying a dirty bomb inside a shipping container will sail into Haifa Port and explode is far more concerning.

Already in the early 2000s, Western intelligence agencies began to warn of nuclear terrorism. In 2003, the US National Strategy for Combating Terrorism warned that the risk of nuclear terrorism had increased significantly and that it posed one of the greatest threats to the national security of the US and its allies.
But 2008 was the year that brought a much bigger blow. In December, the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, established by the US Congress about a year earlier, issued its first earth-shattering report warning that a nuclear or biological terrorist attack was likely to occur within the next five years.

“Unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013,” the commission concluded.

Read more:  http://www.jpost.com/Features/FrontLines/Article.aspx?id=248764

http://www.bobtuskin.com/2011/12/09/operation-dark-cloud-israel-to-begin-national-drill-simulating-%E2%80%98dirty-bomb%E2%80%99-attack-on-jewish-nation/